The poem confronts the reader with the unknown and suggests that reality cannot be fully grasped. Coleridge deliberately uses words which evoke the unknown, such as “measureless,” “holy” and “sacred,” to emphasize this theme. The idea here is that mystery lies at the heart of beauty. It is only when one accepts this tenet that one can be truly creative. In a state of uncertainty, one should be led by the power of the imagination. This movement can be seen in the poem itself, which travels from pleasure-dome to violent river and gorge to the images of the wailing woman, the Abyssinian maid, and the poet-prophet. These images are determined by imagination and intuition rather than sequential logic. Further, the poet uses elements of the supernatural to evoke the wildness of the imagination. In Romanticism, the imagination is an extremely powerful force; submitting to imagination rather than just facts enables the creative spirit. In “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge himself uses his imagination to enrich the poem’s universe. Thus, the fictitious River Alph and Mount Abora coexist with the historic figure of Kubla Khan.

In the poem’s universe, there is nothing jarring or odd about the poet’s words creating a “dome in air,” as described in the third stanza. In fact, these images and metaphors are figurative, rather than literal, emphasizing the power of the imagination to circumvent rationality and stir the psyche. The name Alph—derived from Alpha, the first letter of the Greek Alphabet as well as Aleph, the —guides the reader to consider the river as a metaphor for the creative spirit. The creative spirit and the imagination are the alpha, or the primary moving force, of the mind.

One of the most prominent themes of the poem is the coexistence of seemingly opposed concepts like pleasure and violence, nature and artifice, light and dark, and life and death. The poem begins with the lines “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree,” which leads to the assumption that the speaker will describe the pleasure palace. Yet the descriptions veer towards the grounds and ultimately the River Alph and its features. The river is a curious, multi-layered motif, sometimes showing through the gardens in “sinuous rills” and meandering through woods and dales but at other times erupting as a geyser in a violent storm of hailstones. Further, it rushes and roars underground before sinking into a lifeless and sunless sea. The intrusion of words such as “lifeless” in the context of the pleasure-dome shows that pleasure and violence, life and death are concurrent, coexistent realities. The coexistence of contrary elements is not an uncommon conceit in Romantic poetry, as can also be seen in the works of William Wordsworth and William Blake. This union of discordant elements stems from Romanticism’s appreciation of nature and the imagination. Nature is both destructive and creative, and pleasure and violence are necessary features of the creative process. Thus, life must be accepted in all its beauty and harshness.

Other coexisting contraries are civilization and savageness. A resplendent pleasure palace is transformed into the site of a haunting image at the gorge. The poet imagines a woman wailing for her demon-lover. This unsettling image is far from the formulaic descriptions one would associate with a decadent palace, and it draws the reader into a terrifying yet holy place. The spot of the gorge is described as “holy and enchanted,” thus bringing together the sacred and the supernatural, the holy and the magical, the godlike and the demonic. This collapsing of boundaries is further seen in the figure of...